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Can a Mayor Be Too Honest?

Take Philadelphia Gas Works. Selling the city-owned utility, which until recently was the center of numerous corruption scandals, is exactly the sort of thing that Nutter was brought into office to do. Proceeds from the sale would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the city’s ailing pension fund, as retirement benefits eat up more and more of the municipal budget each year.

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In March, Nutter announced that a Connecticut-based firm would buy the city’s gas company for nearly $2 billion. As long as the Democratically controlled City Council agreed, that is. If lawmakers don’t sign onto the sale by July 15, the firm can walk away from the deal.

Days away from the deadline, not a single councilperson has introduced Nutter’s bill to sell the utility. Stalberg, who was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News for two decades before becoming an ethics watchdog, says this is shocking: “In my 40 years of watching this town, this is the first time I remember a mayor being unable to get a bill introduced.”

But under Nutter, this is somehow the norm. City lawmakers have stymied his reform agenda at every turn: They’ve refused to introduce a pension reform bill that he supports. They twice killed his proposed soda tax to fund the cash-strapped city government and even-more-cash-strapped schools. They shrugged off his call to give up their taxpayer-financed cars. Council has overridden so many of Nutter’s vetoes that one member even said publicly that he was “nostalgic” for the days when mayors won once in a while: “I had a bill once in here that passed 16-nothing,” Councilman James Kenney recalled at a voting session earlier this year. “But Mayor Street at the time, he sent it back disapproved, and on the override effort, I lost 10-6. … You got to work the veto.”

Nutter’s critics (and many supporters, for that matter) say he is ineffective because he is a profoundly bad politician. They say he has refused to acknowledge the realities of politics in Philadelphia, where you must dole out favors and occasionally yank them away in order to push through legislation. “I wish it weren’t that way,” Stalberg says. “It’s very primitive, but you have to be willing to use very primitive tools in order to succeed.”

Ed Rendell, who has been lauded as one of the most masterful Philadelphia mayors in history, described the crude way things get done here in the book A Prayer for the City: “A good portion of my job is spent on my knees, sucking people off to keep them happy.”

Nutter operates quite differently. According to City Hall insiders, he insists that legislators should sign off on his ideas simply because they’re “the right thing to do”—a holier-than-thou attitude that doesn’t jibe with people who who, above all, want to be re-elected. It also doesn’t help that he has resorted to publicly shaming City Council, such as when he called them out in his 2009 budget address about their taxpayer-funded cars.

Kenney, who has known Nutter since they went to high school in Philadelphia together, says if the mayor really wanted lawmakers to hand over their keys, he should have discussed it with them privately. Kenney was an early ally of Nutter’s, but that changed after he says he realized that he was getting nothing in return for carrying Nutter’s water.

“You call them, not for yourself necessarily, but for constituents, and they don’t seem to really want to be helpful,” he says, about the Nutter administration. “Politics is retail, and they’re the least retail politicians I’ve ever seen.”

Mark McDonald, the mayor’s press secretary, is reluctant to admit that Nutter and Council have an icy relationship, and he outright dismisses the notion that he lacks political prowess. “I would say that he is among the best in the business,” says McDonald. “He is a strategic thinker who knows how to find common ground and get results.”

Holly Otterbein covers Philadelphia for WHYY and NewsWorks.org. Follow her at @hollyotterbein.